Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  It all started at Sibel’s boys’ circumcision. For weeks, there was a great fuss of food mania, a retinue of porters carrying enormous baskets on their backs delivered the cornucopia, day in and day out for months. The older women wrapped their fat legs around low round tables, rolling enormous circles of dough, so thin that one could see through it. Trays and trays of boereks and baklavas and yogurt cakes were carried off to clay furnaces and greasy pilafs with roasted pinions and currants stuffed into every imaginable vegetable, shellfish, and fowl—eggplant dolmas, sweet pepper dolmas, tomato dolmas, green squash dolmas, grape leaf dolmas, artichoke dolmas. Quail dolmas. Mussel dolmas. You-name-it dolmas.

  The General’s gedikli, the errand boy Memed, brought a small flock of baby lambs from his village, which they kept in the backyard. The children took turns feeding the animals until the time for slaughtering. Gonca and her sisters cleaned and scrubbed their trendy linoleum floors, washed by hand all the embroidered linen from the women’s worm-eaten hope chests, kept in mothballs and used only for special ceremonies, refusing to conform to the capricious ways of the newly acquired hand-crank Mieles that by now every household possessed.

  The men negotiated with puppet masters, magicians, and phaeton drivers, for entertainment. The boys were washed and scrubbed, their heads shaved—all the children deloused—the nails trimmed, the bodies rubbed with aromatic oils, and kept home from school. The girls, however, were suddenly ignored by everyone, which made them needy and envious, especially when they witnessed the arrival of the mountains of presents for the twerps that collected at the foot of the circumcision bed.

  What they did not know was what exactly happened during circumcision, except some nastiness to their “itsy-bitsy faucets.” They had watched other boys wearing white satin embroidered dresses like girls and, afterward wobbling around with bowed legs, forbidden to play soccer for months. But all this seemed like a small price for the attention lavished, all the worldly compensations.

  “Can I be circumcised too, please?” Amber begged Camilla, disturbed by this profound sense of injustice.

  “Of course not. Girls don’t get circumcised in our country.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they don’t need to be. They don’t have the, you know, ‘organs.’ ”

  “What organs?”

  “They don’t have a bibish.”

  Amber contemplated this response briefly, then asked her what exactly was done to the boys’ bibish.

  “They remove the skin.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it gets dirty underneath and shelters germs.”

  Imagining her poor cousins and the other boys at school, their teeny weenies skinned like the eels at the fish market, or the necks of chickens, the weenies that they had so proudly exposed during communal peeing behind the coal storage stalls, was enough for Amber to change her mind. She felt content to keep her lower lips.

  The prepubescent boys lay side by side on a brass bed under a purple satin quilt. White caps embroidered with silver Maşallah charms concealed their sheared heads, lumpy and blotchy as if afflicted with a fungus from the stray cats. An evil-eye charm—a blue glass bead with a yellow iris set in a gold cameo—pinned on each shoulder.

  Alternating silence and sighs inflated the room as if it were breathing. The boys lay impatient, surrounded by their audience, presents piled everywhere—bicycles, soccer balls, flashlights, compass sets, and every gadget obtainable on the black market.

  Sibel’s husband Dursun Bey shook hands with the Circumciser. The Circumciser lifted the lovely quilt, fluffed professionally, exposing the frail bodies of the boys, tunics reaching below their knees; hairless, spindly legs, their feet still soiled from the permanent red clay of Ankara. The younger one looked as if he were about to cry. The older one giggled. Others in the room giggled along. Someone whispered to hush. The Circumciser took something out of his bag, a metal contraption resembling a potato peeler. A sunbeam caught the surface, sending prisms of color all around the room.

  It was a hot day. The ceiling fan turned sluggishly as if its motor were running out. The boys lay soaked in perspiration. This time of the year, the family would be in Moda where it was cool, where they had a sailboat, a private beach. But now they had to accept the change in fortune that had confined them to humid Ankara in midsummer while the nouveau riche families replaced them on the lovely beaches.

  The contraption slid in between the covers like silverfish. Something stirred in the void. The room reached a silent pitch. The boy clenched his teeth, but not a moan escaped his lips. Steel silence, gasps, and the dangling skin. The Circumciser squeezed the boy’s cheek, everyone applauded.

  “Little hero,” someone yelled. “Bravo.”

  Although the boy seemed determined not to cry, a fleeting agony escaped from his carefully controlled face. Betrayal, needing retribution. Revenge, a matter of honor here.

  Aida was standing next to Amber, one hand digging into the girl’s shoulder, the other stuffing a handkerchief in her mouth as if the boys’ pain were transferred to her own body. She must have been thinking of her two sons. The one lost to her forever and the troublesome Osman in a corrective institution. She recalled his circumcision. Maybe she thought, “If they’d only cut off his penis then.”

  The Circumciser wiped his knife with methylate. Down it went under the covers again and out came a cry of such hurt that Aida buried her head on Amber’s shoulder as if she were watching a scary movie she could no longer endure.

  “Mama! My mother!” the boy cried.

  “Shush. Shame on you. Be a hero like your brother. You’re a man now.”

  The crying stopped as the Circumciser’s hand displayed another piece of bloody skin in the air. People applauded again. The show was over.

  Dursun kissed the older boy on both cheeks. Mihriban cuddled the younger one so that the others would not see him sobbing but no attention lavished upon him could diminish the betrayal. His eyes died that afternoon, like the other men of this land. The price of manhood.

  Cool sherbets seasoned with roasted pinions were passed around as the boys fondled their presents while watching the screen of thin transparent cloth, illuminated but motionless. It was adorned with a filigreed palace garden, tottering and fit to collapse at the first sigh of its odalisques, or burst of rage from its eunuchs. The screen vanished to the accompaniment of a weird cacophony; Karagöz and Hajivad, the infamous shadow puppet characters, jumped out of their garish paper skin, insulting each other right and left, and came alive.

  In the bleak backyard, now decorated with streamers and flags, the men gathered, turning headless lamb carcasses on spits that looked like crucifixes. In this setting, Rodrigo arrived, dressed in a black satin shirt and black trousers, carrying a guitar. The men ignored him, which was an insult. The younger women watched him discreetly. The children thought he resembled Zorro.

  He tuned his guitar and “La Paloma” escaped out of his lips like a real dove. The tremor of its wings caressed the sleeveless arms of the women. He sang a couple other songs and then disappeared. No one knew who he was or where he had come from. But they shared a strange intuition that they would see him again.

  The smell of horseshit mingled with roasted lamb as the children were packed into the phaetons. A little girl sat on Amber’s lap. Horses decked with red and green tassels, embroidered vests, good-luck talismans trotted clickety clack on the cobbles, the jingling of their bells accompanied by large kettledrums and high-pitched flutes. They watched a dancing bear with a guard around its snout. The gypsy owner held on to it with a rope as he beat his tambourine. Yallah, Sülüman, Yallah, Yallah. Hele bak, bak, bak. Yallah, Sülüman. Poor Sülüman, the bear, pitifully flea-infested and fatigued, appeared disinterested in the world around him but when the whip hit the ground he stood up on his hind legs, began to sway from side to side, and played his tambourine.

  Yallah, Sülüman, yallah, yallah!

  Sülüman tried coming d
own. The children screamed. The whip hit the ground again, he growled as he stood up and passed the hat.

  The braver of the circumcised boys, disinterested in the bear, clutched a transistor, Elvis singing “It’s now or never,” and flaunted his new Donald Duck watch.

  It was late afternoon by then. The young bucks and pretty girls accompanied by their families, promenading down Atatürk Boulevard, dressed in wild colors of courtship—bright florals, ribbons, and gauze. The phaeton trotted down a badly paved street of this unexceptional city of terra-cotta roofs, the red arid dust. In the distance, stood the sparse silhouette of the enormous scaffolding that would eventually become Anit Kabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum.

  Later that evening when Gonca came to tuck Amber in, she pulled a piece of paper out of her bra.

  “Amber, can you keep a secret?”

  “You know I can.”

  “Promise me over your dead mother and father and all your other relations that you won’t ever, ever tell anyone what I’m about to show you.”

  “I promise over my dead mother and father and all my other relations that I will never ever tell anyone what you are about to show me.”

  Gonca then handed Amber the piece of paper.

  “Read to me what it says.”

  Amber looked at the printed letters on powder-blue vellum perfumed with a pressed violet.

  “Lovely Gonca,

  How are you? I’m fine except I can’t sleep at nights thinking of you, your cherry lips, your apple cheeks, your almond eyes . . .

  Amber began to giggle. Gonca slapped her hand gently and said, read on. So she did. The letter was unsigned but the child’s intuition guessed it was from the General’s gedikli, Memed, the shy, rosy-cheeked lad (who helped her mother since Ayşe’s disappearance with a ragseller soon after their arrival). The one who had brought the flock from his village for the circumcision. That night and many nights to come, Amber lent Gonca her child’s handwriting, her crooked capitals, misspellings, became Gonca’s voice and her secret love, Amber’s own secret. That’s how she learned to write love letters.

  But no secret lasts forever. Memed’s military service was coming to an end and he would have to return to his village in Çemişkezek with a wife from the big city. The family gave them a wedding at the Army Club, after which the young couple moved down to the tiny studio in the basement and Memed was promoted to the status of my guardian and persuaded to stay. Thus Gonca remained attached to the family till the very end, until the lizard fell into her glass.

  After it was all over, Cadri would say that Rodrigo was no more than a rascal, a crafty con artist, one who became so good at it that his act ceased being a con and turned into his destiny. But the image of himself as an impostor was so deeply imprinted in Rodrigo’s heart that it would never occur to him he had an option—even when he fell in love. An illusionist who, when his illusions became real, could not tell the difference. A dreamer who’d stop at nothing. A rogue who would not hesitate to take a shortcut through a cemetery at night to get where he wanted to go, but always carrying a rose, just in case.

  During the languorous siesta hours, the younger women often escaped to the Blue Angel pastry shop across the street. Underneath the shade of green-and-white-striped awning, they licked profiteroles while exchanging gossip like a cat’s cradle. Uncluttered now by the dark-scarved matriarchs who presided on their bridal thrones at family gatherings, they sipped café glacée, served with silver straws, dunking their petit beurres and bitter-almond cookies while whispering secrets to each other with bubbling enthusiasm.

  While they swore faithfulness to their husbands, their libidos were titillated with the images of their matinee idols, as well as their look-alikes who seemed to materialize in the most unexpected places. Sometimes they took the girl children along, not bothering to censor verbal confidences since children were assumed to be deaf to things they were not supposed to hear. The children themselves, accomplices in this, feigned invisibility, the best way to discover mysteries they did not quite grasp.

  The women chattered about the Robert Taylors they knew, the Clark Gables, and Tyrone Powers. They giggled, pointing at the third floor of the apartment building across where a Ray Milland lived. But none of them had much respect for this Ray Milland, who never seemed to work but instead sat all day long on his balcony in his striped pajamas, reading Ulus (The Nation) and chain-smoking government subsidized Yenice cigarettes while his two pretty sisters departed early in the morning and returned at dusk, their skins paled from a day’s work under fluorescent lights. This Ray Milland they called “the lazy man.” Handsome but lazy. What a horrid waste!

  That afternoon at the Blue Angel, Papatya, often silent and inexpressive, chirped with wicked enthusiasm.

  “I saw him again,” she told the others. “I saw him.”

  “Who?”

  “That mysterious man who came to sing “La Paloma” at the boys’ circumcision. I saw him at the music store buying paper and we talked.”

  “No joke!”

  “What can I say? He’s divine. Looks like Cornell Wilde, dances like Carlos Gardel, and sings like Mario Lanza.”

  “But who is he really?” asked Aida.

  “No one knows for sure. Some say, the son of the Bolivian consul who left home one day, no one knew why, taking with him only his guitar. They say he slept in alleys and stood at street corners passing the hat, playing his music. A true artist. Not the ordinary vaudeville kind, you know. Nor gypsy. So elegant and exotic in that gaucho outfit, singing songs in a language of passion like some performer out of Flying Down to Rio.

  “So, he’s a street musician?” Sibel stirred, raising her eyebrows.

  “Not any more. Çhardaş, the Hungarian club owner discovered and hired him to sing and dance the samba and mambo and carioca at the Circle d’Orient.”

  “But won’t he need a partner?”

  “Like Fred and Ginger.”

  “They are looking for one.”

  “Too bad you had to stop dancing, Papatya, you’d be perfect,” Sibel addressed her sister, condescending.

  “What’s his name?” interrupted Aida.

  “Rodrigo. Rodrigo Cavallero.”

  They all ululated. “Rodrigo Cavallero. Vallah! Vallah! Cavallero! Ah!”

  “Cavallero,” said Sibel, “means horse in Spanish.”

  “A horse rider,” said Camilla.

  “He has many other names, all so very long. Çhardaş thinks he’s really a prince from Bolivia. No, Argentina. No, no, Chile. Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s Brazil. Anyway, one of those Latin places down there where they have winter when we have summer.” She rolled her eyes. “Makes them warm blooded, you know? Most likely he sleeps all day long and up all night.” She mimicked the Andrews Sisters singing “The South American Way.”

  They all giggled, their eyes alive.

  “Is there a Madame Cavallero?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe we can talk Cadri into taking us to the Circle d’Orient tonight so we can see him sing and dance.”

  All clapped. Except Sibel, of course. The sourpuss. Every family has to have one of those to tip the scale. Yet they are always so predictable.

  Amber licked her chocolate-covered fingers from the profiteroles as she observed the women’s feet under the table. All had new two-toned summer shoes on, all with perforations and holes—navy and white, brown and white, black and white, or red and white. Sibel’s legs were already thick and straight like tree stumps, dark prickly hairs sprouted out of her skin. Aida was the only one with real ankles, the kind that tapered gracefully. Camilla had the tiniest of feet like those Chinese women, her peep-toed shoes revealing toenails painted iridescent purple. Papatya’s hyperextended arches smoothly blended into her legs, her toes curved the way of a ballerina.

  “She showed so much promise,” Aida told Camilla later, as they walked back arm in arm. She and her sisters derived great pleasure taking turns telling stories of their lives
before Camilla’s arrival into the family, embellishing every nuance, and Camilla listened intently, her heart pounding, absorbing what she could concerning Cadri’s past.

  “Her body was so transparent,” Aida continued. “She really had a dancer’s heart. They sent her to dancing lessons with a White Russian woman, Madame Ouspenskaya—her husband was a mystic of some sort, Ouspenski. She danced with all of herself, defying gravity until the most unfortunate curse of puberty brought on the changes in her body. When father saw her in her tutu, her tiny tits perked up from rubbing against the silk camisole, he figured it was time to bring this deal to an end before they grew big enough to dangle like watermelons.

  “So, one day, after rehearsal, my parents picked Papatya up at the dance studio and took her to a photographer who tortured the poor thing into interminable pliés and relevés—the ones in Cadri’s picture book, you remember? When they came home, they ceremoniously burned her tutus and toe-shoes in the brazier. The whole house stunk. ‘Passions are in need of pruning, not cultivating,’ father told us all. No more dancing for Papatya after that. No way he would have allowed me to join the beauty contest if he were alive then.

  “Anyway, after that, Papatya began to get plump, dragged her fanny around the house. She took up singing instead, because she could sing in her room and they would have to cut out her tongue to stop her. As long as her voice did not drift out to the street and arouse the pedestrians, the family tolerated her chirps. But, no matter what you do, you can’t change one’s fate.

  “One day, a young olive-oil broker named Tarik, small-boned and pin-mustached, was walking down the street when he heard a voice as sweet as halvah, wafting through the cracks of the closed lattices, a voice that sounded like a prepubescent boy’s just before it dropped. You know, that sweet castrati voice, the child soprano. He stopped to listen and, enraptured, returned every day for more. He never saw her face but the voice had conquered his heart, convincing him that he would have her as his sweet wife.